With the advent of online service providers such as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe, as well as with the advent of the Internet, computer chat rooms have become increasingly popular. Computer chat rooms permit any of a number of computer users scattered across the country or around the world to virtually talk with one another within a virtual chat room. That is, text or other data entered on a computer by one user is displayed on the computers of all the other users within the same virtual chat room.
Chat rooms have become a popular manner for computer users to communicate with other users having similar interests. For example, a football fan may enter a computer chat room geared towards football to discuss football with other fans. Online service providers such as America Online also routinely host chat rooms geared towards a specific event. For example, while a Super Bowl or other such major event is being televised, the service provider may host a chat room for fans to talk about the currently televised event.
However, such chat rooms fall short of an optimal user experience. A computer user watching television, for example, has to change television channels to a desired program, but then also has to log on to an online service or the Internet and find a computer chat room specific to the program being watched. If the user changes channels, the process starts over: the user has to again find a computer chat room specific to the program being watched. Because of the inconvenience in having to constantly manually change chat rooms, the user may believe that such inconvenience outweighs the benefits provided by participating in such chat rooms, and not participate.
In one limited solution to providing an Internet URL address automatically in conjunction with the broadcasting of a television program, the Internet URL address of a related web site may be broadcast in the vertical blanking interrupt (VBI). A browser program may automatically go to the address being broadcast, or it may present an option to the user to press a button in order to go to the address. Thus, the VBI approach means that the user does not have to constantly manually change chat rooms. However, the VBI approach is itself quite limited, in that it is susceptible to timing problems. That is, if a television program is recorded to a video cassette recorder (VCR), when it is later played back, the browser program may still attempt to go to the address being broadcast, even though it may no longer be applicable. Thus, the user may be confronted with an error message, stating that the broadcast web is no longer be accessible.